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Goal in life: Create order, think lateral.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
For work I have to start modeling a new architecture for a Document Management System (DMS). A good occasion to work with IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA)! Something I had planned already a long time.
Installing over the IBM intranet was very easy :-) By the way don't confuse RSA with RDA (Data Architect), this is another application.
RSA is most like a big work bench for the professional IT architect and can be daunting at first sight. In this respect many have said that the learning curve is steep. And it is. The possibilities are virtually endless though.
It comes stocked with many prefilled models. I used the Enterprise IT Design Model. This one has standard packages for Design Contracts, Use Cases, Component Specifications, Implementation Designs, Viewpoints, Architectural Layers and Package Dependencies. Also templates for specification elements are included.
Probably best to follow the instructions mentioned in the model:
- Create sub-packages for your components inside the Component Specifications package.
- Create sub-packages for your use-cases inside the Use Cases package.
- Create use-cases in your use case sub-packages. Don't populate them yet.
- Create the components and interfaces (specification elements) that you think you need.
- Update your use cases with the components and interfaces, use the default sequence diagrams. Interfaces become the roles. Only specification elements of type interface are automatically updated with the operations that you put in the sequence diagram!
- Create sub-packages for your implementation designs in the Implementation Designs package.
- Populate the implementation design packages with implementation design diagrams and elements that implement the specification Interfaces and realize the design contracts.
This will probably take about a day or two to figure out. Also, I must admit, in my case not without some curses. As said, steep learning curve.
One weird thing I encountered was that whenever I created a relation between two objects in a diagram, I had to close and open the diagram before I could do anything again... -> please fix!
Despite, this is definitely a very cool plaything, eeuuuhm... complete work bench!, when you are into architecture.
To try it out, I back-engineered the architecture of my site www.theriddle.eu. Here are some pictures (click to enlarge).
Component specification overview
Sequence diagram for viewing the answer to a riddle
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